Yeeeeeah, sorry Arkandel but I'm like... five minutes into that video and I'm going to give myself a migraine from rolling my eyes so hard.

Like, a minute in, he's giving a pitch-perfect recital of the Thermian argument--link to the video that coined the phrase, but for those who don't want to watch a five-minute video, the "Thermian argument" is presenting the fictional in-universe justification for a plot or setting element as a response to critique, as though the speaker was a Thermian from Galaxy Quest. (If you haven't seen Galaxy Quest I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul, and the Thermians are a species of alien who don't understand that fiction exists, so when they have to deal with a conquering warlord coming to exterminate them, they kidnap the actors of a Star Trek expy to save them. Also watch Galaxy Quest it's hilarious and also legitimately the best Star Trek movie ever made.)

Point is: he tries to brush aside criticism of the racial problems with orcs by citing the in-universe explanation of how the orcs are actually elves who'd been tortured and degraded by Morgoth. Someone who knew Tolkien better, though, would know that this was only one of several explanations he toyed with through the years, although it's the closest that's come to a "canonical" answer. Other thoughts included the idea that Morgoth created the orcs as a mockery of Men and Elves, but that ran into the issue that evil, in Tolkien's conception, can only corrupt but not create. Another was that orcs aren't really alive at all, just matter set into motion by Morgoth and Sauron's will, but that has the issue with how they're presented in the books as individuals with personal desires, grudges, and so on. The thing about being corrupted elves is the best one he came up with, but as mentioned, that runs into the issue that corrupted elves should, then, be redeemable.

What all that word word words amounts to, though, is Tolkien trying to reconcile his cosmology and Catholic worldview with what orcs actually are, which is: something that looks like a person only hideous and inherently evil. (The letter mentioned in the video and the article referenced, incidentally, has Tolkien describing the orcs as "squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types." "Mongol-types," here, being a reference to the archaic racial classifications, Caucasioid, Mongolod, and Negroid. You can tell that orcs are monsters because they look like really ugly Asian people.)

So no, some post-hoc worldbuilding to explain why the degraded and repulsive Mongoloid horde of subhumans are coming to slaughter, enslave, and rape the virtuous Normans and Saxons who stand against them doesn't actually make it stop being some really racist tropes. And then we can get into the D&D presentation of orcs, where they're physically powerful but mentally dim tribal creatures with an inherently savage disposition, lead by chiefs and bolstered by shamans or witch doctors to provide spellcasting ability. Incidentally, Gygax explained to D&D players that killing orc babies was moral behavior because "nits make lice," a word for word quote from when Colonel John Chivington sent the US Army to kill Cheyanne children at Sand Creek, Colorado.

(Oh, hey, and he brings up the Drow, too. The elves who have black skin because they turned evil. Like the Curse of Ham.)

Like, I'm not saying "cancel Tolkien" or "cancel Gygax" (although seriously Gary the fuck), but it's frankly some willful blindness to pretend that the "evil races" in fantasy and D&D don't have some fucked-up relationships to the real world. (This wasn't a discovery made on Tumblr, either. Michael Moorecock touched on a good bit of this in his essay "Starship Stormtroopers" in 1978, and The Iron Dream was written in 1974, with the conceit that it was a classic heroic pulp novel written by Adolph Hitler after his political ambitions didn't work out.)

Okay, back into this... six minutes whining about how someone ate a ban on RPG.net because people were saying to talk to an actual Native American before writing Native Americans into a published setting, and this guy gave a whole thing about how that's hard. Neato.

Two minutes complaining about pronouns. Rock the fuck on.

Okay, cool, and now we're onto PETA... oh he's saying that considering marginalized people who might be in your audience is exactly like PETA talking about how we shouldn't use animal characteristics as insults because he's made the whole argument around a strawman that people are saying that literally no one should ever be offended by anything so "what will the PETA people think" is exactly the same as "is this being racist and will that drive minorities out of my hobby."

Right, fuck this, tapping out.

Also, in a feeble and ill-considered defense of my gender, it's not just dudes who MU* a gay member of the opposite sex as a fetishy stereotype.

Oh wow.

@Tyche turned out to be an racist shitbrain.

Who could have seen that coming.

What an entirely unforseeable development.

@coin said in Real life versus online behaviors:

The internet is where moderation and limitations come to die. You wanna see what someone's willing to do, say, and support? Go online.

I don't care if you're a fucking saint in every social interaction offline--if you're a dick online that means you wanna be a dick and think it's funny. The degree to which that's a problem varies widely.

"The person who's a sweetheart to their date and an asshole to the waiter is an asshole."

I just don't really buy the whole "community will regulate bigoted shit-flinging" deal, especially on the intertubes.

That works as long as the community has a strong core of non-shitbags who are, for whatever reason, dedicated to sticking out and shouting down shitbaggery. As opposed to non-shitbags just picking up sticks and going somewhere with a less unpleasant shitbag/non- ratio, which itself skews the ratio shitbag-wise, making it less appealing to non-shitbags, and on and on and now you have 4chan.

The image links to the thread. It was a worthwhile read, to me at least.

@arkandel said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:

@tyche said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:

@wizz said in I owe a lot of people some apologies.:

I get a little tired of the dumb, brassy lynch mob attitude around here sometimes.

Toxic femininity.

What the hell man. Especially not in this forum section, not that it works in any. Come on.

Are you... I mean, are you surprised? Like at all?

@BlondeBot said in Model Policies?:

Shhhhh, it's okay. Show me on the doll where my bad rules examples hurt you...

Your examples are bad policy because

@BlondeBot said in Model Policies?:

No politics
No social justice
No sexuality/gender/orientation

means that, while my saying on channel that I went to see Star Wars with my wife is unobjectionable in any context, there are a lot of people (especially on MU*s) for whom that would qualify as a "political," "social justice," or "sexuality/ gender/ orientation" statement.

@Pandora has the right of it comparing such a policy to DADT. "Don't bring up sexual orientation" has never meant "cishets aren't allowed to mention that they have a spouse/SO." "Don't bring up sexual orientation" always just means "queers, stay in the closet."

A policy tries to force political neutrality, and does so by determining someone's existence to be a political statement, is taking an intensely political stance.

@Kestrel said in Tyche Banned:

feeding and allowing him to oh-so slyly provocateur on this forum for so long to begin with.

You know, that's the thing.

I'm not talking shit about him on this thread because he and I argued a lot and, now that he's gone, I'm wallowing in schadenfreude and taking some cowardly potshots when he's not here to clap back at me.

(Okay, I'm not just doing that don't @ me)

It's been really clear for a really long time that Tyche was not engaging in good faith. I'm not saying this because we disagree on politics, I'm saying it because he kept breaking the rules, kept catching a warnings, and not once did he interpret these warnings as "I should engage with the other posters on this forum like a decent human being." At most, he tried to ask a couple questions to work out exactly where the line was for various-ist trolling so he could creep right back up to that line and start edging his toe at it.

Until he finally, finally overstepped it enough that he got shitcanned from the forum, about as unpredictably as the fucking sun rising in the fucking east.

Which was always the way this was going to go. If someone breaks a rule, catches a warning, and shapes up, then hey, we have a good forum citizen, slaughter the fatted calf. If someone instead shifts the exact same pattern of behavior but not-technically-quite breaking the rules as they understand them, they will keep catching warnings until they finally get kicked out for good. The only question is how much they shit the place up until it reaches that point.

My $0.02 anyway.

@ganymede said in Good TV:

Is it?

Maybe, maybe not?

There's a difference between the actual impacts of Netflix not seeing the growth it wants and expects and the impacts of Netflix's reactions to the less than expected growth and its results on the user experience.

So even if it is a market overreaction (which seems likely) the fact that Netflix is responding by cutting anticipated shows, cracking down on password sharing, and talking about plans to introduce ads seems like this might be the start of one of those shifts where the company stops trying to build business by attracting more customers and starts trying to extract more revenue from the customers it already has, and that's a shift that can spiral really quickly.

@tinuviel Oh, yeah, a whole other thing--where some of the theoretically-equivalent character options wind up made useless because of the "metagame."

I have come to appreciate, more and more, the way some games will clearly delineate between "game focus" skills and "other." LANCER, for instance--an RPG about giant robot pilots--has PC abilities that relate to giant robots fighting each other on the grid map, and entirely different (extremely loose) character abilities purchased with different resource points for when you aren't in the robot.

@jennkryst said in Is Min/Max a bad thing?:

Obligatorally chiming in because I half-min-max... but it's rarely for combat efficiency or the like. It's almost always done when a game's chargen and xp advancement ratio is different. To explain to the five people on the forum who dont know the concept, and to use the nWoD math... two characters start, one with 1/1/1/1, and the other with 4/0/0/0. Player one needs to spend 27 XP (6 + 9 + 12) to get to 4/1/1/1; player two needs to spend 9 XP (3 + 3 + 3).

And I hate--hate--this because it means that...

So, okay, I want to make a PC who's an unquestioned master of the blade, educated in natural philosophy, and disarmingly erudite, but I don't have the starting character resources. Fair enough! I'll make a character who's an expert at the blade, familiar with natural philosophy, and an apt conversationalist, and work from there.

Except... if I make an unquestioned master of the blade who's about as educated as an especially oblivious rock and with half the charm, I'll be playing the character I actually want to be playing in half the time. Making a less-good version of the character I want to play, rather than a different character who can become the PC I wanted in the first place with time and character resource investment, is the wrong decision and I can prove it mathematically.

Which, generally, is my problem with Min/Max-ing. Not that it's a bad thing to want your PC to be good at the thing they're good at, but I would like to have a character who is a functional human being also, please and thank you. And technically, sure, no one's making me min/max my own PC, but if it's established as an expectation in a given game the options amount to keeping up or falling behind; excuse me if I'm embittered by the fact that making a starting PC with a range of skills to reflect a lived experience in-setting is strictly inferior to rolling up a monosyllabic illiterate who always smells faintly of bad eggs but is really good at shooting.

Although, to be clear, my first snark will always be toward the game system, rather than the players who choose to make the clearly optimal choice.

(Last, perhaps peevishly, I might suggest that if I'm to see familiarity with the game system as a positive good, as the Reddit link suggests, the DM should be running something better than D&D5 oh snap indeed i went there)

@23quarius said in Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever:

So while where the "line" is is not clear to me here, it does fall somewhere along the lines of "If what you are doing poses a threat to people other than yourself". If you're the one who stands to get hurt, no, you should not be expected to know how to guarantee your own safety. If you're part of the chain of potentially posing a danger to someone else who is not yourself, you should be expected some minimal training.

The line is between having another pair of eyes on someone else's work and having the work of a professional undone, checked, and redone by an unqualified member of another profession.

You brought up checking the chamber, but what would that have told anyone? That there was a round in the chamber, obviously, but there was supposed to be. The issue is whether the rounds were blanks, dummies, or live rounds, and an actor isn't going to be able to tell the difference there without unloading the weapon, looking at the bullets individually, and putting them back in.

So the idea of having actors check the rounds would mean taking the weapon that was prepared in advance by a professional, and then having it unloaded and reloaded in the middle of an active set by someone in the middle of doing their actual, completely different, job.

This would void the production insurance and get any set that tried it shut down. And it would be right to do so.

So, a few days late to this one, but coming in to drop my $0.02.

Which is, mostly, that a lot of the (well-intentioned) ideas people seem to be having are, kindly, counterproductive.

Relying on actors to do the final checks on firearm safety means taking the final responsibility for set safety from (what should be) a trained professional working in their field of expertise to someone in a completely different field who might be getting some on-set training. And I'm sorry, but that is a terrible idea. Firearms would not be made more safe by having unqualified third parties who have other significant time and attention pressures messing with the dedicated professionals' safety measures on the last step before their use. That's not just unhelpful, it's actively irresponsible, to the tune of "voids the production's insurance" if they would even try. (There's a reason the last people to touch the fireworks are the pyrotechnics experts, not Gene Simmons.)

Actors might need to point guns at other actors. They might need to be seen loading bullets into a gun on-camera. They might need to act the part of someone irresponsibly handling a firearm. They might need to stick the barrel of a gun in their own mouths and pull the trigger. They need to be able to know that when the actual professionals hand them a cold gun, that gun is actually cold, so they can do their jobs because the other people involved did theirs.

From the looks of things, the armorer on Rust never should have had the job. So that is the one place Baldwin might be responsible. Even that I'd put as something of an open question; "Producer" is a notoriously vague role, that can mean anything from "final decision on every point" to "cut a check before the start of production."

So I'm off my meds again, because the doctor I'd been seeing left the practice that's in network, the other doctor doesn't believe adult ADHD is a thing, and the nurse practitioner wants me to go back for more "objective" testing before she'll put me on amphetamines again.

So now I get to go through the whole thing again.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

But Quinoa Is Supposed To Be Healthy Sausage Casserole

1 cup quinoa
1 tbsp olive oil
1 lb sausage
1 onion
Sliced mushrooms (optional)
1 egg
Salt to taste
2-3 cups shredded cheddar cheese

Preheat oven to 400F. Boil quinoa with 3 cups of water until fluffy.
Dice onion. Heat olive oil on skillet and sauté over medium heat. Add mushrooms and sausage and cook until brown.
Scramble egg with salt.
Combine cooked quinoa, sausage, mushrooms, onions, egg, and 1-2 cups cheese. Move to baking dish and cover with 1 cup cheese.
Bake for 25 minutes until golden brown.

This Is Killing Me Creamy Chicken Parm

4 tbsp butter
2-3 boneless chicken breasts
1/2 onion
3-5 cloves garlic
1 cup long grain rice
2.5 cups chicken stock
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup parmesan cheese
salt to taste
1 tsp herbs du provance

Dice onion, garlic, and chicken breasts. Melt butter over low heat in skillet. Add onion and raise heat to sauté. Add garlic and cook until fragrant.
Add chicken until surface is cooked, stirring occasionally.
Add rice, stock, salt, and herbs and bring to boil. Cover and cook until liquid is gone.
Add cream and parmesan, stir until cheese is melted and rice is coated.

@arkandel Legit questions!

In the case of Star Wars games, I think that's actually been something a lot of SW properties have tried to work on. The simplest, usually, has been to either make it explicit that the protagonists of the property are Jedi, or make no one Jedi. A few, like one of the really early Star Wars MMOs (maybe the first?) went by blocking off Jedi as an option except through a long and convoluted process of unlocking the class.

Otherwise, mechanically, the go-to has usually been to try and roughly balance the "mundane" skills with force powers, whether that's in point-buy or level systems. And with SW, none of the force powers we see are that overpowered compared to "dude with gun" or "hotshot pilot."

On top of that, being a Jedi comes bundled up with the whole quasi-monastic obligate good guy thing, unless you want to turn into a strutting vaudevillain (which might not be playable in the system). So that is a choice, there: do you want to move stuff with your mind, or do you want to get to be a seedy gunfighter with a heart of gold?

And then, for all that, I do know people who basically felt pressured into turning their non-force-user PCs into Jedi in MU*s because, essentially, that's where all the good shit was, plot- and RP-wise. Even in the interquel period, you tend to get a lot of Jedi running around, where "remnants of a vanquished order driven to hiding under the relentless threat of pursuit and extermination by all the powers of the galaxy" and "literally anything else" wind up with rough parity.

More generally, though, and also as far as superhero stuff goes: I think that a major part of it, as applies to RP, comes down to using more narrative or freeform than what I called "physics simulator" mechanics upthread. When the whiz-bang powers come with quantifiable mechanics on a sheet, providing options that the wizards get and the warriors don't, you actually are hindering yourself by not getting wizard powers. When the power levels are all narrative, and either you're setting it up by group consensus or "roll Forceful to Overcome Obstacle" or whatever, everyone has the same... I dunno... "meta-narrative(?)" involvement in the outcome, even if in the narrative Thor is slugging it out with the whole CGI army while Natasha is running the goober to the skybeam to shut it down or whatever.

@arkandel Yeah, I'm not super familiar with WoT (just never got into it), so grain of salt as far as all this goes.

The first thing you bring up, well, it doesn't surprise me at all. Players getting around restrictions by trying to find edge cases and loopholes is as old as RPG gaming. The three ways around it are players who are willing to buy in to the spirit of the rules, arbitrators who are willing to shut down attempts to bypass them, or rules that explicitly disallow that sort of shenaniganary. (On a MU*, the first is basically impossible, just because most don't have enough of a screening process to enforce that sort of things.)

The second comes down to the "interesting choices" thing I keep going on about. Why, as a player, would I pick "not-wizard" over "wizard"? How is "not-wizard" something other than "the PCs who are wizards can do whatever you can, but also they are wizards and can get up to wizard shit."

If you want "not-wizard" to be regularly played, you need some good answers to that! Otherwise it gets to be like the oWoD games I mentioned, where even though vampires are supposed to be vastly, vastly outnumbered by the mortals, the assumption is explicitly that PCs are vampires and playing not-a-vampire is a niche option.

Also, yeah, more or less everything that @Pyrephox said. Novels don't need to worry about balance because it's by design that someone is just cooler and hotter and better than everyone else, that's why they get to be the protagonist. Even TTRPGs can be fine focusing on two to six of the specialist snowflakes in the world. When you get to 20+ players, things start to shift.

So asking about WoT specifically (with, again, stressing that I'm not overly familiar with the setting), I might well start by saying something like "you can't buy combat skills if you're a Channeler, maybe there are in-universe ways that someone could have but your PCs didn't." A little harsh, but sometimes you need to be. And/or maybe saying that magic can only be used in a scene with a runner, where the pitchfork mobs present a real threat. Or maybe a more FATE-style narrative system that doesn't bother with the physics simulator aspects. Something where in-universe the wizard can throw up walls of fire while the warrior has a knife, but mechanically they're rolling more or less the same "Overcome Obstacle" dice.